Though this article is meant for the preschool environment, it makes many great points that my blog has touched on over the years. Please visit the NY Mag article HERE.

The main point is this from the article, "The purpose of this exercise is not to teach children how to make clay alligators and coffee mugs. The purpose is to teach children a predictable cognitive sequence they can apply when they encounter anything new: Observe, question, explore, reflect. Repeat. The children learn to respect their materials, not just to dive into them. They learn – without having seen it before – that clay is a material they can use to represent something else, a key developmental challenge" for all levels.

​Art is creative problem solving. All of these suggestions boil down to setting up a visual problem to solve that will have inherently diverse answers. No two people will have the same life experiences, opinions, families, points of view, cultural experiences, etc., and we can incorporate this diversity into the lessons we plan and create for greater depth, expression, and personal expression.

Broad Selection:By giving choices of themes that fit within your unit of study, individuality is more assured. Put possible selections in a hat for students to choose from. Think of a broad way to incorporate your idea so students can choose their own direction.

Create a movie poster or comic book cover parody for a movie you hate or love.

Write your name in Chinese but include stuff that tells us about you.

Designing Solutions:By creating a situation with an open ended problem that can have many solutions through design can be a great way to build in diverse results. These can often look like engineering problems, but can also be devised as fine art projects:

Create a tower with 10 sheets of paper and 1 yard of tape

Create a structure that can hold the weight of 10 textbooks

Design a tree house that will use the tree as a structural element

Create an altered book that includes 5 sections to represent your unique life experiences

Incorporate personal point of view be it political, based on conscious, or personal choice.

Expressing personal traits (Athletic, smart, lazy, shy, energetic)

Design an award you’d want to win for your strongest skill.

Using only colors or patterns based on a swatch of paper or given/selected image.

Abstract Expression and Symbolism:Using color, shape, and/or form in an abstract way to express feelings, but based on a personal of given visual vocabulary (See “The Emotional Color Wheel.”)

Incorporate symbols of the self

Symbols for likes/dislikes

Using colors, shapes, or forms to express how you feel.

Describe your family unit as a mobile of forms and colors.

Alter colors, shapes, or forms to influence how other perceive it.

Personal Themes:Expressing how you feel about a topic or an experience you have had.

Death or separation

Personal success or achievement

Goals

Personal bucket list

Family

Circle of friends

Inclusion of Self:This can be in a literal sense, like a self portrait, or including yourself within a chosen image, but it could also be about including the personification of self into the image.

Include yourself as a monster, flower, alien, animal.

Using the self to guide outcomes (Fish with big tail for athletic kid, small mouth for shy kid.)

Incorporating colors, shapes, or patterns you are wearing today

Without a doubt there will be some cross over here, but these are the broad types of approaches I use to assure that all my students will have diverse results and that no two projects will be alike. For more resources on these kinds of projects, please click on the tables to the left for my 2D and 3D lessons as well as other links there. For comprehensive published resources you may want to visit Firehouse Publications.

​WELCOME:

Please Note:

If you get nothing else from my blog THIS POST is the one I hope everyone reads.

THIS POST spells out my approach, and THIS POST explains how I create "Choice-Based" lessons that connect to core content.THIS POST explains how you can plan projects that assure individual expression.​Teachers on Facebook,can chat with me HERE.(Please answer 3 questions to enter)